


Privileges

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 13:51:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17163143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: In which the two things Roy loves best (that is, sleep, and Ed) are inevitably at war; and some of the vagaries of age catch up, but it's really not so bad.





	Privileges

**Author's Note:**

  * For [520Cenz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/520Cenz/gifts).



> Hope everybody is having a great holiday season so far! ♥ I wrote this bit of fluff for Lee but wanted to share it with you guys too! 
> 
> (P.S. If your parents or other family members are being unsupportive, I am your adoring mother now. I love you, and I'm so proud of you, and the only gift I want this year is for you to be happy, whatever that means to you. ♥)
> 
> (P.P.S. If you haven't yet heard, Tumblr did a swan-dive even more directly into the garbage than usual. I'm keeping a spreadsheet of Tumblr refugees' other accounts to try to help people find each other on different platforms! Check it out [here](http://tierfal.tumblr.com/post/180972952704/royed-fandom-index) or see how to get added over [here](http://tierfal.tumblr.com/post/180924546739/hey-royed-fandom) – anybody can be a part of it; there are no prerequisites except diggin' that Roy/Ed goodness. ♥)

Fingernails scratch gently at the nape of Roy’s neck.

“Hey,” their owner says.  “Wake up.”

“No,” Roy says.

“C’mon,” Ed says.

If Roy squeezes his eyes shut hard enough, there is a remote—but not nonexistent—chance that the universe will simply implode around him, and he can go back to sleep.

Or perhaps not?  He isn’t entirely clear on whether sleep, or much of any activity for that matter, will be possible after the implosion of the universe, and the individual most qualified to answer that question is the one whose attention he is currently trying to avoid.

“I know you’re awake,” Ed says.

“Heavens,” Roy says into the pillow, which has not yet proved kind enough to eat him whole.  “I wonder why that is.”

“Just brilliant, I guess,” Ed says.  Unfortunately, he’s right.  “C’mon, it’s Al’s birthday.  We gotta bake stuff.  If you let me do it unattended, we’re gonna have cinders instead of a kitchen.”  Even more unfortunately, he’s right again.  “It’s not even that early.”

“That is an unsubstantiated opinion,” Roy says, “which I contest.”

“Oh, good,” Ed says.  “Vocabulary’s up and at ’em.  The rest of you always follows pretty soon after that.  Here, put on your fancy-pants glasses so we can get going alrea… oh, shit.”

Like a dog to the sound of a whistle—Roy is sitting upright, utterly alert, before he even processes that he’s moved.

“What’s wrong?” he manages, halfway to reaching out, and he registers…

Ed, wearing Roy’s glasses, squinting avidly and scrunching up the rest of his face to go with.

This display is shortly— _aha_ —followed by Ed removing Roy’s glasses, squinting again, looking down at them, and repeating, with a significantly larger quantity of awe:

“Oh, _shit_.”

“It’s not _so_ surprising, is it?” Roy asks—gently, though.  He’s still marking out the map of all the unexpected places where Ed bruises at a touch.  “You read like books are due to disappear from the face of the planet.  And your father wore glasses, didn’t he?”

“As a fashion statement,” Ed says, with such distaste that Roy has to bite his tongue to refrain from commenting on just how rich that is, coming from the red-and-leather-clad hellion of old.  “He was a four-hundred-year-old Philosopher’s Stone.  You can’t get me to believe any part of his visual system was deteriorating.  And if it’d been messed up when he started out, that would’ve fixed it.  Whole thing was a crock of shit, if you ask me.”

Roy opens his mouth to say _That, my dearest love, is precisely why I do not ask you._

“Jeez,” Ed goes on before he gets the chance.  He tilts the glasses back and forth, watching the buttery morning light play on the lenses.  “They look good on you and all, but… yeah.  No thanks.  I’ll just gradually go blind.  It’s fine.”

This time, Roy opens his mouth to say _You will do no such thing_ , but Ed has donned the glasses again and is leaning in towards him.

“Holy hell,” Ed says this time.  “You’re even hotter when I can get all this detail.”

Roy no longer remembers what he meant to say, or what he ever meant to say, or what he might intend to say at any point in the future.

Ed’s eyes flick up and down.  “Gettin’ pretty gray, though.”

“All right,” Roy says, reaching for him, which—in retrospect—goes about as well as he would expect when his quarry has a twofold visual advantage.  “Your glasses privileges are revoked.  Permanently.  Give them back.”

“Nah, I kinda like ’em,” Ed says, grinning as he scrambles back across the sheets to stay just out of range of Roy’s fingertips.  “Man, look at all those _wrinkles_.”

The halcyon days of youth may be well behind him, but Roy is spry enough yet to kill his miserable excuse for a boyfriend in cold blood—which is precisely what he intends to do, right up until the point that a snickering Ed scoots to the edge of the mattress, half-turns, catches sight of himself in the mirror on the door of the wardrobe, and stops still.

Roy takes a breath and tries at a smile.

“You don’t look like him,” he says.  “You look like you.”

Ed manages to tear his eyes away from the mirror long enough to search Roy’s face—as though he isn’t sure if he’s permitted to believe it.  The naked gratitude that overwhelms his expression for a substantial portion of a second is reward enough for Roy, even if it disappears into a more familiar exaggerated pout soon after that.

“Al’s been saying for _ages_ that I was gonna ruin my eyes if I kept reading in the dark all the time,” Ed says.  “He’s gonna be so smug.  Guess that’s the best birthday present I could give him, though.”

“You’re the only gift anyone in their proper wits would ask for,” Roy says, folding his arms on the comforter to lean on them more efficiently.  He’s been told that he has a natural gift for posing like an underwear model so many times that it may just be true.

Ed has turned his better-focused gaze up towards the ceiling, but he offers Roy another pulled face.  “You always harass the hell out of your presents?  Wait, don’t answer that.”  He lifts the glasses off carefully and—with a tenderness that belies all of the preceding histrionics—settles them on Roy’s face instead.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “Seeing you clearly is one of life’s finest pleasures.”

“ _Gross_ ,” Ed says.

“Testing the limits of your gag reflex is another one,” Roy says.

“There’s a couple different ways you could do that,” Ed says, but he doesn’t give Roy time to drool _or_ to revel in it before he’s leaning forward, kissing Roy’s forehead, and then bouncing up and off of the bed to go steal Roy’s bathrobe.  “Just not when it’s Al’s birthday, and we got stuff to bake.  C’mon, get up.  You know what happened last time I tried to make a cake without supervision.”

“A dark day in the history of Amestris,” Roy says.  “Literally, given the smoke.  The second one was lovely, though.”

“My ideas are always good,” Ed says, “and my timing’s always shit.  What else is new?”

Roy thinks _Nothing_ , and _Everything_ , and _This love doesn’t seem to hurt_.

“The fact that you need glasses,” Roy says.  He taps the frame with a fingertip.  “We could get you a pair to match.  Couples’ glasses.  It’s the next big thing.”

“You’re disgusting,” Ed says.  “I will die first.  But not until after we make my brother a cake.”

The word _reluctantly_ does not encompass the towering impact of Roy’s regret at having to leave this bed before eight on a Saturday.  Perhaps it’s true—what they say about love, and the things you’ll do for it.  “Chocolate?”

“Obviously,” Ed says.

Roy puts his feet on the floor.  With his glasses duly returned to his possession, and duly set in front of his eyes, when he looks at Ed half-silhouetted in front of the window, he can distinguish every single one of the flyaways lit up flaming gold.

“Lead on,” he says.  “I’m with you.”


End file.
